Collaborative Cross Modal Interfaces

The Collaborative Cross-modal Interfaces (CCmI) project is a Research Councils UK Digital Economy
Programme funded project that aims to explore the use of multi-modal input and output technologies
(audio, haptics, graphics) to improve the accessibility of collaboration using diagrams in the workplace.
The challenge is to design support for collaboration where participants have differing access to modalities -
we refer to these situations as cross-modal collaboration.

The rationale driving the project is that collaboration is a fundamental form of human interaction.
However, software tools which support collaboration assume that all collaborators have access to the
same sets of modalities e.g. audio-video conferencing systems assume all participants can see and
hear the outputs of the system, and shared whiteboards assume equal access to the visual modality.
This disadvantages users with differing access to sensory channels due to their context and abilities.
It is a critical problem for distributed team work where participants are likely to use different
communication technologies to collaborate (e.g. mobile teamwork) as well as co-located work groups
involving elderly participants or participants with perceptual impairments (e.g. visual impairments).